August 1, 2018

The law does not prevent the election of a non-Jewish prime minister. So what is the whole brouhaha about?

These past week’s media attention was devoted to two issues, the Nation-State Law and the Surrogacy Law. They overshadowed almost anything else. In the news, they preceded the murder of Aviv Levi on the Gaza border on July 20 and Yotam Ovadia in the town of Adam on July 26. They took precedence over the ongoing war on the southern border. This legislation must be a real threat to the well-being of the State of Israel, otherwise it would not have been so central.

Before considering the media’s treatment of the issues, it is worthwhile to review the facts. The Nation-State law states three basic principles: 1) “The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established; 2) The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination; 3) The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

These three basic tenets were predicated on Israel’s proclamation of independence from 1948, which stated among others: “Accordingly, we, members of the People’s council, representatives of the Jewish community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist movement, are here assembled … by virtue of our natural and historic right…hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel, to be known the State of Israel.”

Is there any material difference between the law and the declaration? We do not find it. Did the media clarify that or muddle it? Both texts make it clear that the state is a Jewish State. No one’s citizen status has changed. All citizens, whether Jewish or not, have equal citizen rights, including the right to vote and be elected. The law does not prevent the election of a non-Jewish prime minister. So what is the whole brouhaha about?

One of the questions posed is if the law just restates the obvious from the declaration, why is it needed? This is an interesting question that could have been addressed equally to the two basic laws of 1992 that “declare basic human rights in Israel that are based on the recognition of the value of man, the sanctity of his life and the fact that he is free. Define human freedom as the right to leave and enter the country, privacy, intimacy and protection from unlawful searches of one’s person or property. This law includes instruction regarding its own permanence and protection from changes by means of emergency regulations.”

These basic laws were also just a reaffirmation of the Declaration of Independence according to which the State of Israel “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Why then, was it necessary to legislate these laws? For a simple reason that the Declaration of Independence has no legal value. The Basic Laws enacted by the Knesset are an ongoing process of creating Israel’s constitution. Just as the 1992 legislation was needed to assure the humanistic principles underlying the Jewish State, so has the Nation-State law assured that Israel is a Jewish State. There is indeed only one part of the law in which Jews and non-Jews are unequal and that is the Law of Return. One may envisage in the future a Supreme Court which would invalidate the Law of Return since it violates the principle of equality. The present law prevents such a scenario, it defines the State to be Jewish and thus allows preference for Jews over non-Jews.

However, the media discourse over the law is very different. Perhaps the best clue for what the brouhaha is about are the interviews on both Galatz and Reshet Bet with Assaf Heifetz, a former Chief of Police. Asked what is wrong with the legislation, he answered, the Druze population is obviously offended and if so, it must be a bad law and MK Benny Begin is against the law, so it must be a bad law. His answer was so silly that Ran Binyamini, the anchor on Reshet Bet, found it necessary to remind Heifetz why the law is bad – according to Binyamini it treats the Druze as second-rate citizens. Heifetz, of course, agreed with him. But in contrast to Binyamini, to be accurate, there are no second-class citizens in Israel. There are either citizens or non-citizens. Jews in the Diaspora who are not citizens of the State merit a special status through the Law of Return. Non-Jews who are not citizens, do not.

Why indeed are the Druze so upset? Eyal Assad, head of the Druze members of the Bayit Yehudi party, explained on INN News on July 26, “The Nation-State law is a declarative law which defines the State of Israel as the State of the Jews and there is no Druze who has anything against that…. The anger is that the law equates the Druse and the Arabs. It left out the rights of the Druze.” In other words, the problem is not what is in the law but what it left out. Arabs are not drafted into the army, the Druze are. Such fundamental differences should not be glossed over.

Atta Farhat, chairman of the Druze Zionist Council for Israel also supports the law. Yet who are the Druze representatives who are interviewed? People like Rafik Halabi, the former IBA editor, who did his best to oust Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1997 but failed.

The same story concerns the Surrogacy Law. The noise was due to the fact that the law does not provide the rights of surrogacy to males who live together as a couple. This was deemed to be so blatant a violation of the rights of gay men that the National Broadcaster Kan permitted its employees to participate in the various demonstrations against the law. The media discourse was boring and very one-sided. The idea that allowing surrogacy to gay men may really harm women who would be paid to use their bodies hardly received any attention. Even today, gay men go to countries such as Thailand, pay money to poor women there who give birth and are then separated from their offspring for the rest of their life. One can only imagine the ensuing psychological damage.

But no, such serious questions are not part of our media focus. It is much more interested in democracy. The Knesset legislation, it is claimed, and the media actively promotes this narrative, is, in both instances, a violation of democracy and so must be annulled, at all costs.

If “democratic” implies that the Knesset is not sovereign to legislate but the media is, then perhaps we do not need such a “democratic” state?

July 18, 2018

The ultimate power of the media is editorial discretion. This is what gets stories published or broadcast as well as how they are served up to the media consumer.

The story of the mostly teen-age boys’ soccer team trapped with their coach in a cave in Thailand and their rescue was riveting. It had all the elements of drama, heroism, danger and the human spirit. And the media devoted hundreds of hours to reporting it. Even Israeli media sent special correspondents to the site. Experts on scuba diving, spelunking, stress psychology and medicine informed us of what could be.

During that same time, floods in Japan caused 200 deaths. There were terrorist attacks on security forces along the Tunisia-Algeria border where at least six people were murdered. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 10 people were burned to death in ethnic attacks. At least nine were killed in an Al-Shabaab car bomb attack in Somalia, and in Tultepec, Mexico, at least 24 people were killed in fireworks explosions. Editorial choices had to be made, obviously, as to what we media consumers received and what was relegated to secondary attention, if at all.

An academic study published last month by Lia-Paschalia Spyridou of Cyprus’s University of Technology in Journalism, defines the functions of professional journalism as “agenda setting, gatekeeping and framing.” The ultimate power of the media is editorial discretion. This is what gets stories published or broadcast as well as how they are served up to the media consumer.

Many news outlets seek to paint their product as possessing a reputation for “dispassionate, high-minded journalism.” For too many, however, that is a hollow aggrandizement. Editorial discretion became famous in the 1987 US Federal Communications Commission decision that suggested while it would no longer uphold the “fairness doctrine,” it would expect that news broadcasting provides for a reasonable discussion of views. Editorial discretion is the instrument whereby editors not only evaluate sources, balance claims and seek to produce accurate and verifiable information, but it permits the selection of the story according to the above-mentioned agenda setting, gatekeeping and framing privileges which an editor possesses.

SOMEONE WELL-POSITIONED within the media milieu has provided testimony that something can go very wrong with the end product. John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, appeared on July 8 at London’s Royal Geographic Society, and according to The Guardian’s Mark Lawson who was present, had this to say about journalism bias, “American and Australian journalists interviewed him because they loved his work; British interviewers arrived intent on negativity and personal intrusion.” In referring to Shane Allen, head of the BBC’s comedy output, he added, “His real title is ‘Head of Social Engineering.’” In the end, it really isn’t funny that our news, our political, social, economic and cultural commentary, as well as our military overview, and the types of panel discussions we are shown can be – and have been – so biased.

Returning to Spyridou’s study, she saw “evidence showing that journalism has entered a second, more vigorous developmental stage at which journalists are pushed to negotiate their gatekeeping power and take advantage of the sociotechnical capital available” via social media platforms.

That, we would suggest, means that the bon mot of several years ago that social media involvement would permit a more democratic, representative and supervised media where the media consumer could almost approach a level playing field with the journalists and editors has been disproved. What has happened is that media people have managed to exploit those same platforms to preserve, to a significant extent, their fiefdom. Spyridou herself is optimistic about the “possibilities and opportunities for civic empowerment within participatory journalism”.

Where, and with what, does that leave us here in Israel? IfNotNow has been in the news lately. Haaretz, of course, has lent sympathetic coverage, but it is very helpful if a reporter is basically a semi-member of the group. It would appear that part of the Times of Israel coverage is provided by Steven Davidson. On June 22, he covered the “engagement” of Birthright participants at JFK Airport in New York by members of IfNotNow. Other stories of his have focused on the theme of progressive Jewish millennials. He penned an “American Jew in Palestine” blog in 2014. After visiting Hebron, he wrote, “There was only one thought that reverberated in my mind: Lebensraum. This was how it would have looked like if the Nazis had succeeded, I thought… as a Jew, I began to cry.” It appeared in Duke University’s Towerview September 9, 2014 issue as well.

As a media consumer of Times of Israel, do we now cry?

LET’S TAKE the treatment of a story on an El Al flight out of New York that was delayed, supposedly by ultra-Orthodox men who refused to sit next to a female.

A Facebook post that went viral indicated that the June 21 flight was delayed by over an hour due to the intransigence of four haredi men. One Khen Rotem posted that El Al was “dealing with matters of practical theology and personal faith versus the rights of the individual and civil order.” The mainstream press duly reported this version, obviously without confirming the truth.

Another passenger, Katriel Shem-Tov, emailed Sivan Rahav-Meir, an Israeli journalist, claiming the incident lasted but five minutes. The Times of Israel blog where she published her story in English included El Al’s response, which was that “The details that were reported about the incident were not accurate, to put it mildly. In actual fact, the delay was totally unconnected to the incident… Taking care of the two passengers who refused to sit in their allocated places occurred after the plane had already left the gate and only took a few moments.”

Could it be that the mindset of the overwhelming secular media refused to consider the remote possibility that the haredim were not guilty of the long delay? Are their professional standards so low? On July 12, Turkey arrested Adnan Oktar and perhaps as many as 200 of his followers. While an exotic personality, he has many links to Israelis. He has been charged with spying for Israel among more than 20 additional crimes. Back on March 29, Assaf Ronel of Haaretzpublished a profile of the group which was headlined as if it was a throwback to the magazine HaOlam HaZeh: “Orgies, Blackmail and antisemitism: Inside the Islamic Cult Whose Leader Is Embraced by Israeli Figures.” Haaretz, which is not known for any conservative sexuality line, was obviously upset with Oktar.

There was an intriguing aspect to the story. At the bottom, we could read that Ronel was “a guest of the Turkish state English-language television channel TRT World.”

The state television of the Erdogan regime? Many consider that regime antisemitic. It has supported Hamas and promoted flotillas to break the Gaza “blockade.” It is trying to buy property in Jerusalem’s Old City and fomenting violence on the Temple Mount. Is Haaretz a mouthpiece for Erdogan’s Turkey? A last example is Haaretz’s July 6 political cartoon commenting on the Israel-Poland declaration. It posed the Polish president and Israel’s prime minister holding hands over the rail tracks leading to Birkenau-Auschwitz with the caption “The beginning of a wonderful relationship.”

The relationship between the media and its consumers is perhaps reaching the end of a “wonderful relationship.”

June 20, 2018

Israel’s Media Watch, under the Freedom of Information Act, requested specific information from the PBC. We wanted to know the answers to our questions

Public funds, collected from taxes in one form or another, seem always to be treated in a cavalier fashion, almost contemptuously, and without regard to their real value by government officials or the government institutions that benefit from the collections in the public coffer.

There is a Jewish joke that highlights this unfortunate attitude in a particular fashion.

The shtetl’s “fallen woman” had passed away and donated her inheritance to the local synagogue to support the study of the Talmud. The gabbai arranged for a commemorative plaque and invited the congregants for a kiddush in her memory and to honor this considerable monetary windfall. The rabbi was aghast and, quoting the verse at Deuteronomy 23:18, that the earnings of a prostitute should not be brought into God’s House, attempted to halt the proceedings. The gabbai quickly whispered in his ear, “but, Rebbe, it’s really all our own money.”

The details of the finances of the Defense Ministry expenditures for Galei Tzahal radio are not public knowledge, especially the salaries paid to its civilian employees; that is, the media celebrities it hires. It’s as if “it’s all our own money,” not the public’s. There is no official accounting known to the public, detailing income from advertisements and certainly not the price per ad that the station gets for its air time.

The same holds true – even more so – for the Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBC). It took Israel’s Media Watch years to obtain even minimal transparency for the budget of the old Israel Broadcasting Authority. Israeli law, under the Freedom of Information Act, demands that public entities such as the PBC or Galei Tzahal provide the necessary information to anyone who asks for it.

Interestingly, during the seven and a half months of operation in 2017, the PBC’s income from ads stood at NIS 46m., which is less than NIS 75m. on an annual basis. In 2015, the reported income of the old IBA was more than NIS 110 million on an annual basis. What happened? Why the drop? Will the PBC explain the shortfall?

We know that the time allotted to ads on the PBC has, if anything, increased relative to the IBA, so the only possible explanation is that the price per ad has hit rock bottom. If true, this would imply that the PBC is taking unfair advantage of its public funding to undermine the commercial media stations. Of course, the other possibility is that the department in charge of ad revenues is a failure at its job and should be fired.

Israel’s Media Watch, under the Freedom of Information Act, requested specific information from the PBC. We wanted to know the answers to our questions. How much of the income comes from governmental sources? How much from private? What was the separate income of the different stations held by the PBC?

Why is this information important?

The PBC claims that media pluralism is essential for Israel’s democracy and has blamed the prime minister for undermining it. Well, to open a new radio station, one needs a business model. If the pricing of the PBC is kept secret, it becomes virtually impossible to do this. It is not surprising that we do not have national private radio stations. The PBC refuses to divulge the information, claiming that this is a trade secret. Trade secret? The PBC is not a business, it is a publicly funded corporation. By refusing to be open, the PBC is undermining anyone who would try to compete.

Yet this is the same station that claims that it is the bastion of Israel’s democratic values and their protector and any attempt to really oversee its activities – or worse, close it down – they describe as a fatal danger to our democracy. The truth is that this is all hypocrisy. The major interest of the PBC is to increase its funding so that its “stars” can take home fatter paychecks. Israel’s Media Watch does not accepting that answer and will in the near future take the PBC to court.

This rather minor issue pales when compared to the big news: the merging of TV Channel 10 and the Reshet TV station. Our memory is not short; it was only a short while ago that the Israeli government contemplated closing down TV Channel 10 due to its various delinquencies. At that time, the pronouncements made by officials were scary.

For example, as reported in Haaretz on August 29, 2012, President Reuven Rivlin, who then was only a member of Knesset, said, “The channel is an existing fact. Its closure will endanger the freedom of speech in Israel. The fate of the channel is not only an economic issue but concerns the conduct of the media market in a democracy. I had the privilege of initiating the channel as Minister of Communications and already then felt that the conditions of the concession were impossible. It is true that one has to keep commitments, but the damage to the foundations of democracy and the Israeli media market take precedence.”

The present merging of the two TV channels, which is nothing less than the actual closing down of TV Channel 10, received no such powerful words from President Rivlin. He did not exhort the owners to prevent this serious danger to Israel’s democracy. Why? Because it really is not serious. It is high time that one of these channels disappears, since both have little to offer which is not offered by the Keshet TV station.

But what about the employees? At the time, when the government wanted to close TV 10 down, their hue and cry reached a crescendo. The union shut down the station’s broadcasting for a few hours to express their disapproval with the government’s initiative. Matan Chodorov, head of TV 10’s employee union, was explicit: “The exceptional step of blackening the screen is a result of the ongoing disregard of Benjamin Netanyahu from the most serious crisis in the history of commercial TV in Israel. We hope that the appropriate way will be found to preserve the freedom of the press in Israel and bring Channel 10 to its safe haven.” No more, no less.

Democracy and all its hallowed principles would have been violated had the government closed the channel down. And today? The channel is disappearing for commercial reasons, not political ones, and what happened to the hue and cry? It disappeared. That which is permitted to the rich and financially powerful is not permitted to the people and their public representatives. This is our media and its players. The hype against the closure of TV Channel 10 at the time had nothing to do with democracy and values, it was just another attempt to bring the Netanyahu government to its knees.

June 11, 2018

The public has a much more informed opinion as to the political and ideological identity of the media stars.

Being anonymous, the Benjamite who, according to I Samuel 4, ran from the Even HaEzer battlefield to Shiloh to inform Eli the High Priest at the Tabernacle of the results could have been even a war correspondent. As verse 17 has it, his task was to be a mevaser, one who brings the news. Verse 13 informs us that when he entered the town to report what had happened, “the whole town sent up a cry”. Could that mean people did not like the media, even then?

The bad news that Eli received a few moments later, causing his death, took hours to be relayed. Since then, we have had the Pony Express, telegraph, telephone… and now, via the Internet, news is conveyed within seconds.

Moreover, the purveying of news is no longer exclusively controlled by the media industry. If in the past, reporters complained that politicians were scheduling their appearances to force the networks to carry their words live at prime time, thereby talking over the heads of the press, we witness today a virtual sidelining of the press.

Wesley Yang, a New Yorker contributing editor, highlights in a piece in the Tablet on May 28 the example of Jordan Peterson, whom Yang informs us “does not rely on the gatekeepers of the progressive consensus for his livelihood; indeed he prospers precisely by flouting it.” Yang traces how a narrative is generated on social media, fed back into the mainstream press, which, in turn, is fed back into Twitter.

Along the way, those who disseminate the narrative can be rewarded as well as sanctioned by “mob-style attacks and ostracism.” What is also evident is “confirmation bias,” whereby our threshold to demand proof for claims is lowered and we tend to conform to what we are already primed by habit, familiarity, and the desire to believe.”

In other words, citizen A reads Haaretz, while citizen B reads Arutz 7. Each one becomes a resident of a separate foxhole, believing and disbelieving ‘facts’ she or he cannot independently confirm.

Yang calls the people who make up this new tweet-driven media phenomenon “digi-journalists and social-media mobs”. And we ask: are the tweeters twits or what?

Further, what is the role of professional, and paid, journalists in all this?

An academic article authored by Zhaoxi Liu of Trinity University in Texas and Dan Berkowitz of the University of Iowa appeared last month in the Journalism journal. They suggest that journalists have “contradicting views on whether or not to accept tweets [as] a legitimate journalism artifact, leading to the blurring” of boundaries of “the journalism craft and its core mission of informing the public.”

If they are uncertain, what of we the media consumers? Samantha Bee tweets, outrageous, apologizes and continues to appear on American television. Roseanne Barr does the same thing and is fired. Was there a “mob-style attack” on her?

Twitter, though, allows us, the media consumers also some room.

ON MAY 11, Haaretz published an item by Hilo Glazer asking coyly, “Did US Ambassador David Friedman indirectly support pro-Kahanist groups?” He named one such organization only, “Kommemiyut.” JTA picked it up incredibly fast, and Ron Kampeas’ report in the JTA went from there to the Times of Israel and further afield, spread by journalists via Twitter, from leftist colleague to leftist colleague.

The story was a case of misidentification that any involved political reporter could have, and should have, spotted. One of us (YM) began tweeting the problematic character of the “facts” and urged those with inside information to contact the journos involved. Eventually, the truth came out (there were two distinct groups with the same name, one Kahanist, one not). However, even with an addition of an “editor’s note,” the damage was done. An ignorant reporter with an anti-Friedman agenda, assisted by the same in a news agency, caused ripples that reached the top echelons of the State Department, Congress and the American Jewish establishment. By the way, a check this past Sunday shows the original article still at the Haaretz on-line website.

Before print and then going to Twitter, there was a failure all along the chain of distribution. The reporter, his editor, and the JTA failed. Twitter introduced not only speed but also extensive reach, crossing continents and languages (tweets carry their own translation capability).

Not only was there a lack of professional confirmation of the item, at play was also the frame of enforced “correct-think” that pervades the media as well as academia and the world of entertainment.
The media does play a magnifying role. It may take a tweet and turn it into “news.” This is the case with President Trump. His tweets are publicized and usually also mocked. The recent tweets from Roseanne Barr, Samantha Bee and Joy Reid in America fall into the same category. Somehow there are glaring exceptions. There are political leaders who tweet and yet their outrageous comments are ignored.

A.J. Caschetta highlighted one case in a Middle East Forum piece. The leader in questions is quite well known here in Israel. No, he is not Benjamin Netanyahu but another “belligerent world leader who uses social media to bully enemies and feed his narcissistic delusions of grandeur” – Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Caschetta convincingly illustrates that Khamenei “beats President Donald Trump any day.” In Iran, he has no rivals; most Iranians are barred from using Twitter’s social media platform.

Do journalists, news program hosts or even comedians pay attention to him? Of course not. It is not the intrinsic negative value of the tweeting politician but rather how the media decide to relate to him. It is their biased outlook that leaves the public in the lurch.

Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the Hay literary festival in Wales Sunday that with invasive modern media, the public gets sick of politicians more quickly and, with the 24-hour news format, long political leaderships which usually have contributed to stable governments have come to an end!

The Liu and Berkowitz study mentioned above found that while some journalists saw tweets as a means to an end – marketing their own stories and driving traffic to their newspaper’s website – others just tweeted for the sake of tweeting, turning their tweets into a journalistic product in their own right.

Twitter can also be a battlefield. After Haaretz’s Uri Blau published on May 25 a story on a “confidential dossier” on the American Muslim activist Linda Sarsour compiled by a “secretive Israeli firm” for an “Adelson-funded US group,” Middle East Forum pushed back via tweets that the material originated with the MEF going back a decade, all collected from open sources. Blau’s story was “sloppy and false reporting.”

One consequence of the tweets is that today the public has a much more informed opinion as to the political and ideological identity of the media stars. Another is they can engage the journalist in real time. This is a very positive result, because these tweeters, more often than not, turn themselves into twits and the public knows.

May 28, 2018

The media consumer is left with yet another bias: morality and the question of who decides what is or is not moral.

In the mid-1980s, journalism studies academics began to push the idea that non-biased reporting is untenable and therefore, bias as a measuring tool of a media outlet’s output should be rejected. This was promoted by R. A. Hackett, a professor at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University School of Communication. Robert P. Vallone and coworkers of Stanford University’s School of Journalism, in a highly cited paper which studied media performance during the First Lebanon War, suggested another mechanism was at work, one of social perception, and their paradigm was termed the “hostile media phenomenon.”

The idea postulated was that in viewing the same media reports, opposing groups will register more negative references to their side than positive ones, and each would claim that the coverage would sway nonpartisans in a hostile direction. Within both partisan groups, furthermore, greater knowledge of the crisis was associated with stronger perceptions of media bias.

Their research did admit though that this is not the whole story. They recognized that journalists do indeed possess personal, cultural and political biases, which they insert into their reporting, interviewing and moderating of panels.

They did not acknowledge that such bias significantly skews the coverage, replacing the quest for truth with the quest for influence.

Barbie Zelizer, another well-known media academic who is professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, has now published What Journalism Could Be, a collection of her articles over the past two-anda- half decades. She expresses a wish in the volume that we get beyond “depressed lamentations” and instead focus on journalism’s relevance. For her, the essence of journalism is “creating an imagined engagement with events beyond the public’s reach,” adding (p.6) that “imaginative thinking consists of moral considerations.”

But, again, the media consumer is left with yet another bias: morality and the question of who decides what is or is not moral.

These obstacles were very much in view with regard to the central news issues of the past few weeks: the United States’ decision to withdraw from the Iran agreement, the media’s coverage of the dedication of the US embassy in Jerusalem location and the events at the Gaza border.

What Walter Williams, who taught at America’s first journalism school at the University of Missouri, called a “creed,” which he promoted in his 1911 book The Practice of Journalism, was the view that journalists should be “stoutly independent,” “self-controlled,” “patient” and “indignant of injustice.”

This, though, is not the case, especially in Europe. Much too often, to quote Roy Greenslade, professor of journalism at London’s City University, former Daily Mirror editor and contributor to The Guardian, one finds that “news and comment have been conflated in our mainstream media outlets… No one reading newspapers down the years can have been in any doubt how their political stance has influenced their content.”

The new norm of bias is “spin,” whereby “heavily angled stories and headlines are the norm.” No one in the media is embarrassed “about omission, about failing to inform readers about news that, for one reason or another, fails to fit the editorial agenda.”

Consider the US decision to reject the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, the “Iran agreement”). As we know well in Israel, most of the Middle East, especially those countries that are “moderate” in the eyes of the Western media, cheered President Trump’s action. However, this fact was somewhat hidden by the media, especially the mainstream European media.

On May 8, Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, the Washington correspondent of the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, known as FAZ, had this to say in his commentary on Trump’s decision, titled “Trump’s destructive act”: “That his decision for sanctions against Iran has fatal consequences seems not to disturb Trump. The main issue is that Obama’s legacy is wiped out. And what does the North Korean dictator learn from this?” In plain words, the Iran decision was a frivolous act by a frivolous president whose main goal in life is to annul the actions of his predecessor. Not a word about the interests of the people living in the region.

This was not a unique event. FAZ’s reporting and commentaries were one continuous expression of disgust with the American president. Two days later, Nora Mueller added her two bits, writing, “Donald Trump’s decision to annul the nuclear treaty with Iran is fatal. It increases the danger of instability and new military warfare and this at the doorstep of Europe.” In Spain the situation was no better. The leading El Pais newspaper seemingly parroted the FAZ. On May 10, Javier Solana, under the headline “Trump’s exit from Iran nuclear deal: an epic mistake,” continued with: “What the US president cares about the most is the fact that the deal was signed under Obama.”

The Swiss Neue Zuercher Zeitung (NZZ) was more of the same. The headline of Daniel Steinvorth’s commentary on May 10 was: “Trump abandons the Iranians,” but the content was the same: Trump is motivated by Obama. Not a word about the support for his decision coming from the Saudis or other Middle Eastern countries.

The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of Trump’s decision was similar: “Trump’s trashing of the Iran deal is really about one word: Obama.”

Is it then surprising that Europe as a whole is not backing Trump? The situation is so out of hand that one of us received a letter from a colleague in which he expressed sincere worry about the situation in the Middle East and the danger to Israel.

The relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem was not better received.

Jochen Stahnke of FAZ reported on May 12: “A delicate day in Jerusalem.” Historic? Joyous? Of course not. The subtitle was: “The opening of the American Embassy in Jerusalem is first and foremost a symbolic act. But also symbols can catch fire.”

The Guardian’s May 14 headline for the article by Simon Tisdall on the event was much less guarded: “Death, division and denial as US embassy opens in Jerusalem.” The content was the old stuff: “The pompous grandiosity of this tacky ceremony conveyed the essence of Trump-ism: all sound and symbolic fury, lacking substance or sense.”

Space is lacking here to review the many other important European news outlets and their anti-Trump bias, which is quite similar to the knee-jerk anti-Netanyahu responses of Haaretz.

But the breadth of it all suggests that it is not Israel’s lack of public relations, or antisemitism, which lies at the heart of Europe’s journalism. It is rather a byproduct of an ingrained liberalism which cannot dissociate wishful thinking from fact.

The anti-American and anti-Israel bias that it has created is very real, and is something which we must face and counter. It may be fatal to us, again.

In the liberal Politico magazine, on April 26, Tim Alberta observed of the 30-year effort by American conservatives to prove media bias that, “It’s no secret that the majority of journalists working in national newsrooms are left-ofcenter, at least culturally. Few of them own guns, for instance, or attend church every Sunday.”

Nevertheless, he couldn’t restrain himself, pompously adding, “But most of the reporters at respected, mainstream outlets check their worldviews at the door when covering the news and strive for impartiality.”

That remains to be proven.

For example, consider the reaction both here in Israel as well as abroad to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s presentation of the Iranian files coup. Whether analyzing media reports or how the media is directing and managing the reactions of persons being interviewed, one finds an obvious effort to minimize and basically pooh-pooh what Israel revealed. The story’s focus was moved from Iran’s duplicity to the persona of Netanyahu.

One especially blatant example was evident at US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s in-flight press conference as he was leaving Israel.

Pompeo pointed out that “we now know that they continued to store this material in an orderly fashion for some purpose – right? They kept the documents for a reason, and one can speculate as to why… [they] chose to store in secret and hide these documents.”

So what does a reporter ask? The unnamed journalist, according to the transcript, suggested, “Historical record?” and added, “you’re not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they don’t want to destroy their history.”

Pompeo cut him off: “The world can decide if this was for the Iranian museum that they – that they decided to hang onto it. (Laughter).”

The former American diplomat Aaron David Miller “went dark” to influence the story line, tweeting: “my head’s still exploding re: Bibi’s pitch which makes the Roadrunner cartoon bomb shtick pale in comparison.

Iran lied; OK but precisely about what? Who’s gonna read 100,000 files to find out?” He then added, conspiratorially, “How long has Israel been sitting on this?,” ignoring Netanyahu saying in his presentation that “the information was obtained within the past 10 days.”

Outlandish views were being echo-chambered, such as those of Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution, who was quoted saying “nothing that Netanyahu has said undercuts the rationale for the [Iran deal].”

The beating of media tom-toms to get the masses dancing in a trance was obvious in Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer’s reference to the story. He wrote in The London Times the day after: “What Mr. Netanyahu delivered…was less than earth-shattering.”

And in Haaretz, Pfeffer claimed that what Netanyahu presented “wasn’t a smoking gun but a photograph of a smoking gun taken years ago,” ignoring what Netanyahu actually explained.

Barak Ravid from Israel’s TV Channel 10 also downplayed the event, tweeting “…the data wasn’t new and interesting but for those who appreciate the [spy] genre…

Ravid, in his old age, might have an impaired memory, but we note that Netanyahu’s government has more than once, even openly, ordered bombings in Syria to prevent weapons from reaching the Hezbollah, or lately, to counter Iranian presence in Syria.

Orit Galili-Zucker, a far-left former media adviser to Netanyahu, tweeted that he’s “one of the biggest liers [sic] in the world who’s saying Iran is lying and that’s a macabre joke on brainwashed uneducated citizens.”

Raoul Wootliff of The Times of Israel characterized Netanyahu’s speech as preceded by a “hyperbolic and fear-mongering build up.” Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev spun it this way: “The prime minister risks casting himself as pushing for a U.S.-Iranian confrontation just as he did with Saddam Hussein in 2002.” In other words, since there were no nuclear armaments then, there are none now.

The media message: Netanyahu Lied.

Shalev added that the operation was “a blatant play to domestic public opinion.”

The media message: Netanyahu is a Megalomaniac.

Amir Oren, now at Walla after leaving Haaretz, described the event as “Netanyahu’s Show of Illusions” during which he revealed “old and dusty documents… nothing new.”

He added that “the only thing that interests him [Netanyahu] is delaying the criminal probe against him.”

We are reminded of the media accusing Menachem Begin over the bombing of Osirak in 1982 of possibly sacrificing IAF pilots’ lives just to win the election that month.

Humor also served the media to depreciate what the Mossad had accomplished.

Amy Spiro, writing in this newspaper on May 1, noted that Amichai Stern, the tech and foreign affairs correspondent of Kan, the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation, posted a photoshopped image of Netanyahu hawking goods on Israel’s shopping network. Jokes quickly spread. The police were opening yet another criminal probe against Netanyahu, this time for the theft of Iranian files. Another was that Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev had decided to submit the film recording to the Academy Awards in the category of Short Documentary.

Indeed, many reports highlighted the aspect of a “good show,” one that was “dramatic.” Content was quickly relegated to second place and claims that Iran was actually fulfilling the terms of the deal US President Barack Obama had negotiated were given prominence.

Incidentally, and worthy of more extensive treatment, is the phenomenon of journalists expressing themselves quite freely and without normative ethical restraints on Twitter and Telegram. The practice clearly demonstrates that there is a major problem when it comes to the ability of the public to obtain professional-quality media content.

Almost none of the senior pundits we reviewed raised the point that the total lack of on-site inspections of Iranian installations dovetails with Israel’s claim that Iran was lying or that, as Caroline Glick noted lasted Friday, the storing of the materials was a breach of Article T82 of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the “Iran deal” Dr. Haim Shine observed in Israel Hayom that “Mockery backfires on the media” and that a for ”group of well-known Israeli broadcasters, media pundits and political figures… their hatred of Netanyahu, the ‘Bibiphobia Syndrome,’ throws off their judgment, overpowering their love of country and their concern for its future and security.”

To be fair to Haaretz, last Friday, IMW awardee for excellence in economic reporting Nehemia Strassler wrote: “Might it be that Netanyahu is right? A new accord is needed, one that will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons forever. Our survival depends on it.”

This inserting of journalists, themselves as well as their biased opinions, into their reporting, is part of what Kelly Jane Torrance published in the conservative Weekly Standard on April 27: “There’s nothing the media love more than a story about themselves and if it isn’t about them, they’ll make it so.”

Using disparaging terms, casting doubt where there is none, quoting interested parties and providing less-than-necessary information to prevent media consumers from making informed decisions is not only unethical, but should be criminal.

April 25, 2018

NEWSWORTHY?If we go back a few years to when Israel Hayom was in its infancy, it, too, was ignored by the mainstream media.
BY YISRAEL MEDAD, ELI POLLAK APRIL 25, 2018

On March 11, a slew of Lebanese news agencies and online portals reported that the “Mufti of Jerusalem and Palestinian Territories,” Mohammad Ahmad Hussein, had arrived in Beirut to participate in the 4th International Forum of Solidarity with Palestine, organized by the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. At the meeting, Hussein presented a special citation to the Forum coordinator, Sheikh Yusuf Abbas, for his efforts on behalf of Palestine.

This same Abbas, in his speech at the convention noted that the slogan of the Forum is “Jerusalem is the capital of all Palestine without borders.

Another participant was deputy secretary general of Hezbollah Sheikh Naim Qassem. He is a terrorist. The former chief Hamas terrorist, Ismail Haniyeh, addressed the meeting via satellite.

Sheikh Hussein is no babe in the woods. Last July, in the wake of the terrorist shooting on the Temple Mount in which two Israeli policemen were murdered, he was arrested.

As reported by the Galatz army radio station, “in his sermon, Hussein called on Arabs and Palestinians to gather en masse for the sake of Jerusalem, and against the closure of the compound.” The Kan news network, the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, also referred to his arrest, saying that Hussein had been delivering his Friday sermon outside the Old City’s Lion’s Gate when he was detained.

The story of Hussein’s visit to Lebanon was aired on TV Channel 20 news on April 10.

The news item brought with it responses from advocate Yotam Eyal, a member of the Legal Forum for Eretz Yisrael, who noted that the actions of Hussein are “criminal and serious.”

He further stated that “for years the mufti incites against Israel and its citizens and in this case even met with heads of terrorist organizations who work night and day to destroy Israel.”

On the face of it, Hussein violated Israeli law on a number of counts, such as entering an enemy state, contact with foreign agents and aiding and abetting terrorists. One can be assured that the Israeli security services knew about his trip, yet Hussein was not arrested upon returning to Israel.

Being that our main interest is the media, we note that the press and networks as well as almost every other outlet quashed the story completely.

It was, we can only surmise, not “newsworthy.” Even the conservative newspapers Makor Rishon and Israel Hayom did not report it. Why? Was it indeed not newsworthy? Are we, perhaps, wrong in our estimation of what happened in Beirut last month? Compare to some of the “important stories” that surfaced on Israel’s Remembrance Day and Independence Day. A female soldier was not allowed to participate in an official army singing event and graffiti appeared in Samaria against the local army commander.

These events were reported on rather extensively.

Consider what would happen if a member of the Israel’s far Right participated in a neo-Fascist, not to mention Nazi, support rally in Europe.

Would such an issue remain quiet? So, what happened here? We can only guess.

Our first surmise has to do with the status of TV Channel 20 news. It is a threat to the other TV channels, 11, 12 and 13. Indeed, thus far the ratings of Channel 20 news are on par with those of TV Channel 11, which belongs to the Kan Israel Broadcasting Corporation. The left-wing media is afraid that Channel 20 will become Israel’s Fox News and outperform all the others. The last thing it would want to do then is to provide a platform for a news scoop which comes from the channel.

But this would not explain why Makor Rishon or Israel Hayom remained silent. Perhaps the mufti was on a secret mission for Israel’s security services? Hard to believe, yet who knows? There is, perhaps, a simpler explanation, more logical: lack of solidarity among the media.

Why should anyone give credit to Channel 20 when in fact, all the information concerning Hussein’s visit to Lebanon is freely available on the Internet and Israel’s media should have reported about it in March, not a month later in April? The idea that it is in the interest of Israel’s media to enhance plurality and give credit to an infant news organization seems to have eluded even parts of the conservative media.

There are other aspects that could have played a role in the story being ignored. One is that in March, when Hussein’s visit took place, too many other internal Israeli stories were on the agenda of the news outlets, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s investigations, political infighting or other items. A second is that anything to do with the Temple Mount, the Wakf officials and their activities is usually seen through the prism of “Jews.” More specifically, Jewish “fanatics” or “extremists.”

To step back and see the nefarious machinations of the Muslims there seems to be outside the scope of how reporters and editors view that situation.

Arabs there, invariably, are simply reacting to Jewish moves. They are considered to be the legitimate occupiers of the Temple Mount. They are under threat from the Jewish “fanatics” and therefore the actions of Sheikh Hussein were perhaps not nice, but easy to accept and overlook.

Yet, this is not enough.

Channel 20 has reported other stories, not less interesting.

For example, this past Sunday, it related that senior defense officials have recommended that Israel persuade the United States to delay the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem. According to the report, these officials relate the increased violence of the past few months, including Hamas’s attacks on the border with Gaza, to the American move. It would be better according to their assessment if a more opportune time were found for the move. Education Minister Naftali Bennett, member of the Cabinet, was asked to respond. He made it clear that he would not accept such an assessment and that furthermore such decisions are political ones and are not in the realm of the armed forces.

This too, we would think is an interesting story which should have been picked up, at least by a newspaper such as Israel Hayom. But it wasn’t.

If we go back a few years to when Israel Hayom was in its infancy, it, too, was ignored by the mainstream media. So much so that we in Israel’s Media Watch had to pressure the various state-funded media (whose budgets come from the taxpayers’ pockets) to make sure that the paper’s editorials, journalists and content would be treated on an equal footing to those of Haaretz and Yediot Aharonot when headlines were read out or media people were invited to panels being broadcast.

The bottom line is that journalistic solidarity is sorely needed. It is a fundamental component of a truly pluralistic media scene in Israel.

April 13, 2018

We need remind ourselves that all instruments of power, governmental and non-governmental, are never totally free of weaknesses.

Democracy has become a slogan bandied about by our media too often and too frivolously.

Especially today, Holocaust Remembrance Day, we recall that Hitler’s dictatorship was installed with the aid of the democratic process.

We need remind ourselves that all instruments of power, governmental and non-governmental, are never totally free of weaknesses.

Israel’s democracy is strong and vibrant, even if too many journominous signs suggest that strong forces exist which seek to usurp the democratic process for their own purposes. A free and irreverent media should play a critical role in rooting out and exposing these ugly forces. A free media must stand up to power of all types: political, economic and ideological. Sadly, the Alon Hassan affair is an example of the exact opposite.

Hassan was the all-powerful boss of the employees’ union at the Ashdod Port. He did not hide his use and love of power, leading strikes and assuring that the median salary at the port is among the highest in Israel – NIS 28,000 a month in 2014, the year he had to step down. Hassan was not a particularly endearing person – especially if were not part of his union. He made enemies and his actions led to considerable monetary losses for Israel’s economy. According to his March 2016 indictment, some NIS 22 million in bribes were related to Hassan’s actions. On January 22, 2016, Haaretz wrote that Hassan “has come to symbolize corruption and inefficiency in the public sector.”

Yet Hassan, it turns out, was innocent.

Not being lovable is not sufficient reason for the police and state attorneys to step in. But this is precisely what they did.

With great fanfare, the accusations against Hassan were publicized.

As a result, he lost his earnings, his companies and his freedom.

The police and the state attorneys concluded he was guilty of bribery, blackmail, whitewashing finances and more. Serious stuff, enough to break even strong people.

However, last week, some four years later, the truth came out: Beersheba District Court Justice Joel Eden fully exonerated Hassan.

In his words: “After all the checks, there was no evidence of his cheating and a conflict of interest was not proven. Actions taken as part of a job are not equivalent to fraud and breach of trust. Hassan’s actions were necessary for defending the workers. There is no evidence that Alon Hassan carried out directly or indirectly actions meant to encourage contacts with a company owned by his relatives.”

The response of the prosecutor’s office at the Justice Ministry to Hassan’s accusations, as published on Friday in Israel Hayom, was: “The claims that he was personally persecuted and prosecuted are false and misguided. The indictment was presented to the court after passing the scrutiny of many, including the highest echelons of the State Attorney’s office. They all thought that the evidentiary material was sufficient for [a high chance] of conviction.”

Hassan was an elected official.

He had to step down because some police and Justice Ministry officials used their power, and public funds, to crucify him. Who are these officials? How much money did they waste in terms of salaries, research and other legal necessities, not to mention the court employees, at the expense of the taxpayer? We do not assume for a moment that these officials were settling personal scores, but it is very clear that their professional judgment was and is impaired, to say the least.

In the United States, prosecutors are elected officials and any prosecutor leading such a complex, costly and lengthy case and losing would certainly have to step down. That is true democracy. But here, these same officials will be able to continue using their power frivolously, without any accounting.

The media reported the case broadly, especially due to its implications with regard to the ongoing investigation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family. However it did not pose the necessary questions to nor did it demand personal responsibility from the police, the attorney-general’s office and others. The reaction was quite different from what should be expected.

When Teva announced widespread layoffs recently, the media was in an uproar, especially against the company directors, who refused to accept personal responsibility for the mistakes or return their remuneration to the company. Yet in the Hassan case, although we do not know the exact figures – and this too should be supplied by the State Attorney’s office – there is no doubt that the expense was many millions of shekels. Years of manpower which could have been used to pursue true criminals were wasted. But the worst of it all was that unelected officials used their power to remove an elected one – Hassan.

This is far from being the first time such an event has occurred in Israel. In 1996, former justice minister Yaakov Neeman was just two months in power when he was indicted for giving false testimony and providing illegal consultation to a witness in the Arye Deri case. He was exonerated fully and became Netanyahu’s finance minister. But at that time no one demanded that heads roll in the prosecutor’s office for this unwarranted and unprofessional interference in the democratic process. The lack of media attention gave the police and the Justice Ministry officials the clear message that they were immune from being held personally responsibility for erroneous or misguided actions.

Israeli democracy paid dearly for this media “lapse.” Yom Kippur War hero and former police minister Avigdor Kahalani was another victim. In the year 2000, he was investigated for supposedly obtaining illegal benefits from Ma’ariv publisher Ofer Nimrodi.

He was indicted for exposing secret information concerning the investigation of Nimrodi, as well as breach of trust and obstruction of justice. It took two years, but he too was fully exonerated. Did anyone take responsibility? Did the media demand it? No, they did not.

Perhaps the most egregious example is that of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. He was investigated for a period of over 10 years, with the various allegations changing over time. Not one of them held water and he, too, was fully exonerated. The media, for sure, was responsible for churning up a negative characterization of Liberman but again, with no proof. He was unsavory ideologically to many members of the press – but that is their crime, not his.

He paid not only a personal price but also a public one, and this is frightening. Due to the indictment against him concerning his role in appointing Israel’s ambassador to Belarus, he had to resign his post as foreign minister. The indictment was submitted in December 2012 and on November 6, 2013, he was unanimously acquitted.

The ease with which unelected officials behind closed doors can determinate the fate of innocent people cannot be allowed to continue.

It is high time that even in the hallowed corridors of the Justice Ministry accountability and responsibility become the norm rather than the exception.

March 28, 2018

So now we know that there is too much chametz at the army radio station, why don’t we just clean up? Let’s stop listening to them until they get their act together.

Although she was referring to an incident in which her posterior was groped by an interviewee on live television, what BBC1’s television presenter Helen Skelton said about her reaction could be applied to other ethically problematic facets of the media. She declared, “I felt really awkward… It’s intimidating and you don’t want to be the person who is being difficult… that’s just the culture that television breeds. No one wants to be difficult. You want to bring solutions, not problems.”

In Israel, this is definitely not the case. Our media is urged to bring problems to the fore, but it depends whose problems.

In Skelton’s case, the interviewee would have been immediately hung by the media – provided that he belonged to the “right” camp. Tamar Zandberg, newly elected head of the Meretz Party, was subject to media pressure over her outright lies regarding consultations with right-wing PR adviser Moshe Klughaft for only a short period. Zandberg had denied consulting with him but Klughaft went on record publicly stating that she did.

Zandberg was indeed attacked, and there may still be a legal question, but after 72 hours the issue appears to have died down as far as the media are concerned. Haaretz allowed Alit Karp space to demand she “Go Home!” as she “betrayed voters.” But despite the harsh criticism from Avi Gabbay, head of the Zionist Union, it seems to have ended there.

We are in the midst of the Passover preparations.

Eliminating the chametz from our homes is not only a literal task but a moral one. It implies we should look into ourselves and try to change our habits for the better. For example, our media could try to show more generosity.

Sunday night was a historic evening on the Israeli media scene. A fourth news channel was initiated. TV Channel 20, after years of struggling, finally received the legal go-head to broadcast news. The road was not easy and we reported on the obstacles multiple times in this column. It was only through legislation, aided and supported significantly by Israel’s Media Watch, that the channel received the permit.

One would think that such an event deserved media attention, but on the news of Galei Tzahal or Reshet Bet radio there was no mention. Only the right-wing media – Israel Hayom, Arutz 7, Makor Rishon and a few others – reported on it. The mainstream media kept thunderously silent.

Indeed, the most important comment Arieh Golan gave on Sunday morning was fake news about the Council for Higher Education. Golan claimed that the council had decided to muzzle Israeli college lecturers, preventing them from letting their students know their opinions on current events. The truth is that the council has not decided on anything. It formulated a position paper, which would forbid lecturers from using their lectures as a forum for pressuring students to conform with their personal political beliefs, so as to protect the academic freedom of students to think differently from their teachers.

Golan, had he been a generous, well-meaning person, could have used his radio pulpit to congratulate Channel 20 and note how important it is for Israeli democracy that there exist an additional news channel, one whose point of view differs from all the others, and point out that it will provide sorely needed diversity to our media scene. But Golan only knows how to criticize others. The fact that he usurps the public airwaves for his own political agenda is by now sickening.

So, let us do away with the chametz, for it is our choice to stop listening to Golan. If we want news, not propaganda, there are other, better stations.

Nor is Liat Regev any better. This past Friday on the prime noon news show of Reshet Bet, she had nothing to say about the appointment of John Bolton as the new US national security advisor other than “let’s just see what problems this appointment brings with it.”

Galei Tzahal has been undertaking a special kind of elimination of chametz. It accepted the resignation of journalist Erel Segal. Il’il Schachar, head of news broadcasting, claimed in an interview with Makor Rishon that the reason was Segal’s “insatiable appetite for money” and high salary demands. Unfortunately for her, journalist Kalman Liebskind, Segal’s friend, asked Shimon Alkavetz, the commander of the station, and he denied the allegation, stating that never a word was exchanged with Segal about money. The truth is obviously elsewhere.

Segal is known for his right-wing opinions, of which he makes no secret. In his programs he would attack anything he thought worthy of attacking. His ratings were high, but that was all the more reason to get rid of him – why give a right-winger a position of influence?

Schachar is not new to us. On October 3, 2012, in this column, we reported on Schachar’s blatant unethical behavior.

On November 23, 2011, she provided Galatz’s listeners with a report from Switzerland on a conference of the “Geneva Initiative” which was taking place that week. Her trip was paid for by the Swiss government, a major funder of the Geneva Conference. She knew that a reporter should never receive funding from anyone with interests and especially someone it is her task to report on. But Schachar withheld that information for half a year and divulged it only after being forced to.

Not only was nothing ever done about this, a few months ago she was promoted to heading the news section of Galatz.

So now we know that there is too much chametz at the army radio station, why don’t we just clean up? Let’s stop listening to them until they get their act together.

In a Calcalistech website interview on March 15 on the occasion of their Mind the Teach conference in New York, Randi Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, said, “We need to encourage and support journalism sites that go deep, that are focusing on telling stories, that don’t have clickbait headlines, and that are really doing good investigative journalism.

I think also as consumers we need to be a little more responsible in what we post and what we click on.” That, of course, is advice all journalists should follow from day one in Journalism 101 (that is, if Israel’s media people had actually been required to learn journalism to be able to work).

Zuckerberg’s suggestions are more than just a nice idea. Consider the case of Cambridge Analytica, now in the news for mining Facebook members’ data. It seems that the group was engaged in “psychological operations” – or psyops – changing people’s minds not through persuasion but through “informational dominance,” a set of techniques that includes rumor, disinformation and fake news. What is now termed “psychographic messaging.” Are certain media elites, whether owners of newspapers, directors of companies or senior-level employees working in media outlets, also, in their own way, engaged in similar activities out of an ideological, political or cultural agendas?

Isn’t this, to borrow a simile, the chametz that media consumers need to burn?

March 15, 2018

It is this one-sidedness and lack of truth that is helping Netanyahu. Israel, though, is losing.

As more reports originate from the Israel Police appear, some leaked, regarding the investigation into several alleged cases of embezzlement, bribery and government corruption, the contest for the public’s trust between the media and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is both accelerating and increasing in pitch.

Yardena Schwartz, a freelance journalist and Emmy-nominated producer based in Tel Aviv, formerly with NBC News, called Netanyahu a “media puppeteer” in the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review (February 21).

In his public appearances during his visit this month to the United States, Netanyahu avoided any reference to the legal situation he is embroiled in. It was only mentioned through impromptu remarks to the press, such as “we are attacked all the time – every hour, every minute… I won’t keep silent, I will tell the truth.”

It was but a year ago that he declared, “There is no country in the world where the press is freer [than Israel]. There is no country in the world that attacks its leader more than the Israeli press attacks me. That’s fine. It’s their choice. They are free press and they can say anything they want.” It would seem that even Netanyahu is feeling the pressure.

Some pundits have sought to compare his media wars with those of US President Donald Trump, doing so in a negative, even sneering fashion. But there is more to that comparison.

Andrew Klavan, an award winning mystery novelist whose books have been made into films, wrote on February 4 in New York’s City Journal, an urban-policy magazine, that “a press that has shown itself willing to publish anonymous anti-Trump leaks that sometimes turned out to be false – has made it clear that they do not want you to know what they do not want to know themselves.”

Taking a similar position, The Wall Street Journal editorialized on February 7 that “Some of our media friends are so invested in the Steele dossier, or in protecting their Fusion pals, or in Donald Trump’s perfidy, that they want to ignore all this [the FBI’s wiretap application based on a source working at the direction of the Clinton campaign]. But journalists ought to tell the complete story.”

In quality journalism, a good story is a balanced one, with input from all sides and a “fair” representation of facts and opinions. Are we in Israel receiving professional, impartial, objective, ethical journalism? Or does our press attempt to use its power to forbid us to even think that our editors, reporters and analysts could be, like their American counterparts, less than fair, objective and even knowledgeable?

Robert Lacey is one person whose approach should put television viewers on the alert. He is the historical consultant for The Crown, the Netflix television period drama, and author of many popular histories and biographies. In her December 18, 2017 Town & Country interview with him, Caroline Hallerman observed, “For Lacey, there can be truth without fact.”

In his own words, Lacey said, “I say, ‘I don’t like the word “false.”’ I’d rather say is it true or is it invented? …History is a truth, but there are other truths that are conveyed in the drama.”

While the specific context is docudrama, this type of thinking has infiltrated “straight” journalism. It is standard practice for “expert analysts” who appear on hard news programs. The framework setting attempts to convince the viewer or listener that the speaker is objective and disengaged from the subject she or he is spouting off on. Moreover, these observers always seem to tell us media consumers what the future will be. Not only are the results unimpressive, but the media never seems to check up on how good their “experts” really are. Never has there been a case of a commentator being laid off as a result of false perceptions or predictions.

There is another problematic aspect to modern media, related to how the public engages with the news.

According to the UK Trinity Mirror’s digital editor-in-chief at its regional titles, Alison Gow, many online readers scan headlines and then go to the comments thread without bothering to read the copy (the facts). “People,” she said, “will actively not read a story because they will have a view… If the news pages are full of the personal opinion of reporters, why are they any better than my opinion?”

The Netanyahu case is a classic example. The Israeli press is stumped: after two years of Netanyahu bashing, with one story after another, public opinion polls show, consistently, that the public is not impressed. If one believes the polls, Netanyahu is electorally stronger than ever. Why?

One answer has to do with the perception that too many people in the media have an agenda and therefore cannot be trusted.
In Israel, the public knows there are certain politicians who are protected by the media. Israelis know that MK Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) did not divulge his information about the 1999 election campaign funding (the “Amutot” affair), yet the media did not attack the police nor the attorney general for not following through. Herzog went on to become the chairman of the Zionist Union.

Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, has been caught repeatedly “misrepresenting” facts. In the latest case, Lapid appeared in front of a camera with a person disguised as a haredi (ultra-Orthodox). Lapid did not divulge this information. True, nothing illegal, but has the media asked itself whether this is a person who can be trusted?

The media after but a scant few days closed the story about the possible criminal implications of the behavior of judges Esther Hayut and Hila Gerstel. Gerstel claimed she had been asked by a Netanyahu crony whether she would be willing to assure, if she became attorney general, that she would work in favor of the Netanyahu family. She also claimed she had mentioned the matter to Hayut who did not even report the matter to the police. Are justices immune from press criticism? Or are only certain judges, with certain political opinions, liable to be victims of a press onslaught?

Former president and prime minister Shimon Peres was the crony of many millionaires, aggrandized himself while still alive, yet no one clamored for his relationships with financial moguls to be investigated. Many Israeli politicians worked hard to get the daily newspaper Israel Hayom removed from our newsstands, pushing legislation and receiving positive coverage in Yediot Aharanot, yet hardly any of them were called to task.

The Israeli public is wise enough to understand that even if Netanyahu has broken the law, what is demanded from him is unique. Others under these circumstances would go scot-free, especially if, like prime minister Ariel Sharon, they bribe the press with an expulsion of Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria.

It is this one-sidedness and lack of truth that is helping Netanyahu. Israel, though, is losing.